UK’s first drugs consumption room to open in October
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg4n8g331do
UK’s first drugs consumption room to open in October
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg4n8g331do
7 Comments
Submission statement :
The UK’s first official consumption room for illegal drugs including heroin and cocaine will open in Glasgow on 21 October.
People will be able to consume illegal drugs under the supervision of clinical staff at the facility 365 days a year from 09:00 until 21:00.
The facility is part of a wider move by the Scottish government to tackle the drug death crisis which is claiming more lives per head than anywhere else in Europe.
Crazy to me it’s taken this long, I’ve been in numerous rooms where I consumed drugs in my home country going back decades. Have people in the UK just been getting blasted outside all these centuries?
If I can’t mainline with toilet water in the bathroom of a bus station am I really doing drugs?
Finally, a room in the UK where you won’t be judged for what you consume… unless it’s pineapple on pizza.
What’s funny is that this was an idea I had a few years ago, where my idea was to implement something like this, where the drugs were clinically produced in a sterile environment and you’d pay the hospital for the drugs as well as rent the room. My thought behind this was that with the drugs being produced by doctors, they’ll be safer to use, be less potent overall, greatly boost the economy, and greatly reduce the power cartels have.
They chased the dragon all across the world, and now the dragon is in their homeland consuming their children. Randy Marsh could have told them, you never actually catch the dragon.
Good.
For anyone wondering, supervised consumption sites are not pushers, or dealers. It is extremely unlikely that a supervised consumption site will cause a person to begin using drugs.
The rooms are there so that a person who is already addicted has a place they can go, rather than overdosing in a bathroom stall, or on a bus, or in the stairwell of your apartment building.
Shutting down, or denying, supervised consumption sites does not reduce overall drug use, it just pushes it into bathroom stalls, stairwells, and other areas. For some people out of sight is out of mind, but overall denying supervised consumption sites increases emergency calls.
For example when we find someone in the stairs at work who is high or possibly overdosing, we have to call 911, and an ambulance and often a fire truck come rushing over, usually they also bring a police car as well. Even if the person was just tired, not overdosing, that uses up a lot of emergency resources.
I would much rather that person be sitting in a supervised consumption site rather than the stairwell at work, or the field near my house.
Supervised consumption sites are a good harm reduction strategy, that use less emergency resources, and help people get into addiction recovery programs by giving them a more stable foundation, as well as helping them see doctors and pharmacists who can offer a better alternative than gas station powders and pills.